Welcome to Purse Book, a weekly newsletter about reading hot little books & being a gal on the go. If you haven’t already, you absolutely may subscribe now:
Sometimes a little book is a little breeze, a snippet, slice o’ life, it’s short because it just has a short little thing to say. Sometimes a little book is weighty and compact, like what I assume an iron shotput ball must feel like to have in your hands. Because of some quality of my constitution, I always think a short book is going to have a lightweight quality and I’m always floored and devastated and totally ruined when it doesn’t. Foster, by Claire Keegan, is obviously in the later category. I almost cried on the trolley reading it, but I kept it together and also I couldn’t remember which stop I was supposed to emerge from so I was distracted.
It’s not like a million things happen in Foster. A little kid lives with a foster family in rural Ireland at the turn of the last century. She has her first ever hot shower (a shock), she goes to the ocean, she goes to some stores. It’s a time of discovery, but Keegan writes about revelation very quietly. This girl doesn’t have words to describe the shower, she doesn’t have context to understand this new, warm domesticity she enters into, and this was one of my favorite parts of the book, being on the edge of language and understanding, as it’s happening, as it’s happened.
Foster was also this month’s installment of Purse Book Gals-On-The-Go Official Book Club Book. Here’s what a few Gals on the Go thought:
“I felt so many things: empathy, loneliness, big loss, apprehension, mourning. In such a compact time!” -Christina
“I’m also so picky about books written from the perspective of children. This was the exception that proves the rule, as they say.” - Emily C
“It broke my heart! And, excuse the complaining, wasn’t quite long enough for a full commute (there and back) on the train.” - Mac A.
If you’d like to join the club, you can upgrade to a paid subscription here.